DAY: 2

SESSION: 2

TIME: 11.00 to 2.00

ESTIMATED DURATION: 3 Hours

Topic: 5.Cold Room, Blast Room & Heat Load

Common Storage Temperatures

From the earlier sessions you have understood that food products need to be stored at low temperature
to avoid damage and maintain food quality.

So what is the required storage temperature?

Different food products need to be stored at different temperatures.

For E.g.:

Fruits & Vegetables in general: Approx. (+) 4’C

Fish, Meat, Ice Cream: Approx (-) 18’C

Banana, Mango: Approx. (+) 15’C

Cold Rooms: The room’s where we store food products at low temperature for a long time. Sometimes
these rooms are also known as cold storages.

Steps in Food Processing-Fruits & Vegetables

Generally in India, the product temperature after harvesting fruits & vegetables is approx. 30 Deg C.
Let’s call it as initial product temperature.

Now we need to store it at lower temperature to avoid damage. For fruits and vegetables it is +4Deg C.
Let’s call this temperature as required final product temperature.

So the product incoming temperature to fruits & vegetable cold room is say 30’C and the required final
product temperature is say +4’C. This kind of long term storage of food products at +4’C is known as
fresh product storage.

For less perishable fruits & vegetables like cabbage, carrot, potato, apples, onion, cauli flower, radish
etc., the recommended maximum time to reach from +30’C to +4’C is 24 hours. That is, these fruits and
vegetables should reach +4 ‘C in about 24 hours. This is known as cooling time. So you can place the
above mentioned fruits and vegetables in a ‘fresh product storage cold room’ and you can achieve the
required final product temperature say +4’C in 24 hours.

Note 1: If you want to maintain a product final temp of +4’C, then your cold room temperature should
be approx. +2’C. The final product temperature that can be achieved in cold room will be always 1 to
3’C greater than the room temp of the cold room.

Cold Room Temp

+2 Deg C
Product
Incoming Temp
+30 Deg C Product Final Temp
+4 Deg C after 24 hrs
(I.e. Cooling Time 24 hrs)

Note 2: Pull down time is the time required to bring down the initial product temperature to the
required final product temperature.

For easily perishable fruits & vegetables like tomato, cherry, grapes, spinach, green beans, cucumbers,
leeches etc., the recommended maximum time to reach from +30’C to +4 to +8’C is in between 4 - 12
hours. That is, these fruits and vegetables should reach approx.+4 to +8 ‘C in about 4 - 12 hours. (Pull
down time is 4 – 12 hours)

You cannot achieve less pull down time (say 4 to 12 hours) in a normal cold room. So In case of easily
perishable food products, first you have to place them in a blast chilling (Pre-cooling) room. Blast
chilling room or pre cooling room is a place where you can bring down the initial product temperature
to the required final product temperature with less pull down time. (Generally less than 24 hours)

Note 3: The term pull down is generally used in blast chilling/Pre-cooling rooms. In normal fresh storage
cold rooms we speak about cooling time (Usually it is 24 hrs)

Note 4: If you want to achieve a final product temp of +8’C in less time, then your Blast chilling/Pre-
cooling room temperature should be approx. +0’C. In order to achieve final product temperature with
less pull down time (as in Blast chilling/Pre cooling) the room temperature should be always 7 to 10’C
less than the required product temperature.

Once you achieve the required final product temperature (Say +8’C) in a blast chilling/Pre cooling room,
then you can transfer the food products to a normal ‘fresh product storage cold room’ (Say at +2’C) for
long term storage and the product will achieve +4’C inside this room. This transfer is important
economically as well as from power saving point of view.

Blast chilling/Pre cooling rooms are generally small in size compared to ‘fresh product storage cold
rooms’.

Blast chilling/Pre-cooling
Room Temp
+0 Deg C
Product
Incoming Temp
+30 Deg C Product Final Temp
+8 Deg C after 8 hrs
(I.e. Pull down Time 8 hrs)

Cold Room Temp

+2 Deg C

Product Final Temp is

+4 Deg C and is stored
at this temp for a long
time